|
|
Follow the Middle East Forum
|
|
|
War
and Madness
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
All photos by author.
The cold numbers are the first thing that hit you. Figures telling of
a human catastrophe on a scale hard to compute. Suffering on a level to
which any rational response seems inadequate – 470,000 people killed,
according to the latest estimates; 11.5 percent of the population
injured; 45 percent of a country of 22 million made homeless; 4 million
refugees and 6.36 million internally displaced persons. Life expectancy
is down from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015.
Welcome to the Syrian civil war.
For those of us who have covered the war closely, these are not just
numbers in black and white. They have behind them searing images and
memories impossible to erase.
I remember the throngs of refugees in the olive groves close to the
border fence north of Aleppo in the summer of 2012. The battle for the
city was raging at its full murderous strength a few kilometers to the
south. The refugees, mostly Sunni Arabs, were trying to find a place safe
from the destructive intentions of Bashar Assad's air force. They had no
way to get into Turkey. Their forlorn hope was to take their families as
close as possible to the border fence. They believed that the Syrian Air
Force would not dare to bomb so close to the powerful northern neighbor.
Whole families with small children ‒ some people terribly wounded by
the bombings ‒ living in the olive groves with neither shelter nor
provisions. But I had been in Aleppo city, too, and I knew that their
calculation made sense. Inside the city, the barrel bombs were falling
without discrimination. Houses, buildings, lives turned into nothing.
The Syrian civil war is the
greatest catastrophe to hit the Levant since World War II.
|
This is what the figures are made of. For five years, this is what the
lives of Syrians have looked like. It is the greatest catastrophe to have
hit the Levant since World War II.
Few people saw the war coming. For a moment, it looked as though the
wave of regional change would pass Syria by. The prison-house state
constructed by the Ba'ath Party had strong walls, after all. Its
residents seemed too cowed, too intimidated to challenge their dictator.
Assad himself, in a strange interview given to the Wall Street
Journal, published January 31, 2011, explained why, in his view,
Syria had not and would not experience instability. "We have more
difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of
that Syria is stable," the dictator said. "Why? Because you
have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the
core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people's
beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance."
Here was the language of the Arab nationalist police state in all its
self-assurance and blindness. The prisons full of political prisoners.
The citizenry cowed by an all-embracing structure of surveillance and
repression. And on top of it all, the "president" blithely
insisting to his compliant Western interviewer that the stability was the
result of a kind of tacit contract of consent between the regime and the
people.
It couldn't hold. And, of course, it didn't. As nemesis follows
hubris, so in March 2011, demonstrations by schoolchildren in Dera'a
province were brutally repressed by the local security forces. A boy
called Hamza al-Khatib who was murdered in custody became the symbol for
the protests. The unrest spread to other Sunni Arab parts of the country
– Homs, Hama, Banias. Assad, whose rule, he had claimed, rested on the
unspoken consent of his people, rapidly and predictably abandoned any
such nonsense and sought simply to drown the spreading protests in the
blood of the protesters.
By summer, the stage was set for the civil war to come. The death toll
was rapidly mounting. Western leaders called for Assad's resignation in
August. But Assad was going nowhere. These were the days of the Arab
Spring. People power and demonstrations were supposed to be enough to
bring down the dictators. This happy narrative neglected to note a fact
of salient importance. Deposed dictators – Zine El Abidine Bin-Ali in
Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ali Abdullah Salah in Yemen – had fallen
not only or mainly because of popular unrest against them. They were
deposed because their patron, the United States of America, chose to
abandon them in their hour of need. Assad had chosen different friends.
He wasn't aligned with the West, but with Russia and the Islamic Republic
of Iran. And the response of these two powers, from the very outset, was
to provide the dictator with whatever level of support he required to
stay in his seat.
The form this took varied. Russia used its Security Council veto at
the UN to prevent any concerted action against the regime. Moscow also
kept the weapons coming. The Iranians used their expertise in crowd
control to help Assad control the demonstrations. By the end of 2011, it
was clear that the bright lie of the "Arab Spring," according
to which beautiful young people marching in the streets was all it took
to topple dictators, wasn't going to work in Syria.
At this point, the opposition made the fateful decision to try a
different way. Already, groups of recently deserted soldiers were arming
themselves to defend the demonstrations against the attentions of Assad's
soldiers. In early 2012, these began to crystallize into the first rebel
battalions, organizing not only to defend protests, but also to attack
the army and make areas in revolt impassable for the government's forces.
The stage was set for war.
|
Lieutenant
Bilal Khabir of the Free Syrian Army, with comrades, Sarmin, Idlib
Province, Syria, February 2012.
|
I visited rebel-controlled Syria for the first time during that
period. Idlib Province – one of the heartlands of the emergent
insurgency. I remember the fevered atmosphere of the time and the hopes
of swift victory. I interviewed a recent defector from Assad's airborne
troops in a village called Sarmin close to Idlib City. Lieutenant Bilal
Khabir was typical of the type of fighters who were capturing the world's
attention at that time. Young, idealistic and brave, Khabir had deserted
his unit after a brother officer was executed for refusing to fire on
civilian demonstrators in Dera'a.
"I am with the law, not against the law," Khabir had told
me, as we sat in a half-built structure that formed the rebels'
headquarters in Sarmin. "The regime is fascist and criminal. We
expect what happened in Homs to happen here. But even with our simple
weapons, we are ready to fight. Either Bashar stays, or we stay. And
freedom is the promise of God on earth."
They fought. Khabir himself rose to senior command in the rebellion in
Idlib, before being terribly wounded in action in 2013. The rebels of
Idlib and Aleppo and Dera'a, Quneitra and Raqqa, Homs and Hama and Deir
al-Zor and Damascus made much of those areas no-go zones for Assad's army
in the year that followed.
But even then, in those first days, it was possible to discern the
sectarian hand inside the velvet glove of the rebellion's fine words. In
Sarmin and Binnish, in February of 2012, Salafi fighting groups separate
from the ragtag recent army deserters were already operating openly,
apart from the enthusiastic, often younger rebels of the non-Islamist
units. As the bloodletting continued in 2012 and 2013, it was these
organizations that began to make headway. The secular rebels had no real
vision or idea to put in their place. They just wanted to destroy Assad.
The ideas came from the Islamists. The money, meanwhile, was coming
mainly from Qatar and Turkey. Both these countries favored the emergent
Islamist groups, whose inclinations mirrored their own.
And, of course, there was a discernible sectarian logic to the
rebellion from the start. The Assad family hailed from the country's 12
percent Alawi minority. By no means were all those who had benefited from
Assad's rule Alawis. There were Sunni Arabs and others in senior
positions. Similarly, it was possible to find non-Sunnis and non-Arabs
among the rebels. But the core dynamic was one in which the dictator
relied, ultimately, on the support of his sect. The Shabiha, Alawi thugs
and criminals, who would later be organized by the Iranians into a
well-drilled militia, were crucial to the regime's survival from the
start. Alawi-dominated military units – the special forces, the
Republican Guard, the 4th Armored Division – were also relied upon from
the outset when the large formations of Sunni conscripts were of doubtful
loyalty.
The rebellion, similarly, emerged from the 60 percent Sunni-Arab
majority of the country. In the course of 2012 and 2013, the sectarian
logic of the war became increasingly inescapable. It was marked by the
emergence of new and powerful formations that would play a crucial role.
In the summer of 2012, Assad carried out a strategic withdrawal from a
large swathe of Syria's northern border with Turkey. The withdrawal was
itself dictated by sectarian logic. Assad was short of manpower. Because
of his regime's narrow base, it had become clear that he did not have
sufficient men to hold the entirety of a country largely in revolt
against him. This fateful decision, made out of urgent necessity, began the
process of fragmentation that is now very advanced in Syria. In the
course of 2012 and 2013, the country effectively separated into a number
of enclaves that survive to this day.
|
YPG
fighters at a front line position in Ras al Ain (Sere Kaniyeh), Hasakeh
Province, Syria, March 2013.
|
The regime held on to Damascus and the western coastal areas, and the
road links between them. The Sunni rebels and Islamists had the east and
south. The local franchise of the Kurdish PKK (Kurdish Workers Party),
known as the PYD (Democratic Union Party), established itself as the de
facto ruler of three non-contiguous Kurdish enclaves stretching along the
Syrian-Turkish border. Their formidable Kurdish YPG militia emerged as
one of the most powerful of the military organizations, which now divided
control of the territory of Syria between them. The emergence of the
Kurdish enclaves was further testimony to the sectarian dynamic now
underlying the war.
The rise of extreme Salafi Islamist groups from the womb of the
rebellion confirmed the trend. On January 23, 2012, the foundation of the
Jabhat an-Nusra li-Ahl ash-Shām (Support Front for the People of the
Levant) was announced. Usually shortened to Jabhat al-Nusra, this was the
official franchise of the al-Qaida network in Syria. Led by Sheikh
Muhammad al-Julani it quickly gained a reputation for military
effectiveness and particular ruthlessness. Then, in May 2013, in the
course of a dispute between the Nusra leadership and the leadership of
the Iraqi franchise of al-Qaida, a faction began operating in Syria under
the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, or ISIL). Little
noticed at the time, this jihadi group was set to transform the Syrian
conflict, and then the region.
I entered Syria for reporting purposes on numerous occasions during
that period. Amid the chaos and suffering, it was possible to discern
that something extraordinary was taking place. The state structures that
had existed since the early 20th century in this area – "Syria"
and later "Iraq" were effectively ceasing to exist.
|
The
author and a YPG fighter, at a position west of Kobani, March, 2014.
|
The old borders did not deter the military groups. Journalists crossed
"illegally" with rebel assistance. Sometimes the crossings were
lengthy and perilous affairs. But, more often, the border was hardly
noticed, fictionalized. What had appeared at the beginning to be a war of
a populace against a brutal dictatorship turned out to be something else
entirely. The walls of the prison-house states of Syria and Iraq had been
breached. New and unfamiliar entities were making war among the ruins.
In the Turkish border town of Kielis, in the early summer of 2014, I
interviewed two ISIS members. I had just crossed back from Syria, after
visiting the besieged Kurdish Kobani enclave.
At a place called Haj Ismail, a few days previously, comrades of the
two men I met in Kielis had been shooting at me while I was interviewing
a YPG commander at a forward position. The ISIS positions were about 200
meters away, across a flat, blank landscape. The firing began and I ran
after the fighters as they raced for a machine-gun position behind some
sandbags to return fire. It was a routine incident along a tense section
of frontline. But it was passingly strange to be sitting in a room
chatting and drinking tea with the men on the other side of the lines,
just two days later.
The two men called themselves Abu Muhammad and Abu Nur. They were both
Syrians. "If ISIS falls, you can forget about Sunni people in
Syria," Abu Muhammad told me, after relating the story of his own
long journey to the jihadi organization. The men were animated by a
strange combination of local sectarianism and vast, millennial hostility
to the West. The two fitted seamlessly together and the power of their
combination was evident in the rapid growth of ISIS and the bloodthirsty
fanaticism of its fighters.
As for the movement's goal, Abu Nur spoke about it with reverence. 'We
want the caliphate, something old and new, from the time of Muhammad. The
Europeans came here and created false borders. We want to break these
borders." ISIS, in other words, was emerging directly from the
reality of the Levant in 2014.
The situation, indeed, was becoming increasingly clear. As my friend
Mahmoud, a onetime teacher turned political analyst and a supporter of
the rebels bluntly expressed it, "In Syria, today, there are three
groups worth mentioning. ISIS, the regime and the Kurds. Nothing
else."
The reality of fragmentation and sectarian war burst across the
borders a few months after that interview with the astonishing advance of
ISIS into Iraq. By August, the jihadis had reached the gates of Baghdad
and Erbil. They were stopped only after the entry of US air power into
the fray.
The advance of ISIS into Iraq brought the logic of the Syrian war into
the larger neighboring country. In the dramatic and terrifying events
around Sinjar Mountain that summer ‒ the harrowing attempt at the
genocide of the Yazidi people ‒the sheer savagery of the Sunni jihadis
was laid bare. Here was a horror that defied description. But, while the
singling out of the Yazidis carried with it a special evil, the Assad
regime remained responsible for, by far, the largest number of the deaths
in Syria.
The situation today retains the essential contours that emerged in
mid-2014. The Syrian war has metastasized across borders. As a result,
neither Syria, nor Iraq, nor indeed Lebanon any longer constitute states
in the usually understood sense of that word. Rather, the entire vast
landscape between the Iraq-Iran border and the Mediterranean Sea is,
today, divided up between various political-military organizations and
arrangements, almost exclusively organized along religious sectarian or
ethnic lines.
They vary in orientation from the radical secularism and socialist
outlook of the Syrian Kurds in autonomous "Rojava" to the
murderous and apocalyptic Sunni jihadism of the Islamic State.
Along the way, one may find the Iran-oriented Shi'ite Islamism of
Hezbollah and the Shi'ite militias of Iraq, the pro-Western, tribal
conservatism of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, and various
types of Sunni Islamism in the poorly governed wastelands of the
Syrian-Sunni rebels.
The war has, of course, also impacted far beyond the Middle East
itself. The US and the West have staunchly sought to keep their
involvement to a minimum. But, today, Western air power and special
forces are playing a key role in the effort to reduce and destroy the
Islamic State.
Further west, the Russian intervention after September 2015 almost
certainly saved the Assad regime from destruction and reversed the course
of the war. Currently, there are peace negotiations in Geneva and a
fitfully observed cease-fire.
But the cease-fire relates only to the original war in Syria (regime
vs. rebels). It doesn't impact on the other conflicts that emerged from
its womb (YPG/SDF against ISIS, rebels against Kurds, KRG and Iraq
against ISIS, Turks against PKK, regime against ISIS.
The bombings in Brussels on March 22 are the latest demonstration of
the far reach of the war. What began with demonstrations by
schoolchildren in Dera'a has now turned into a process of flux and
convulsion of historic proportion.
|
A
Yazidi refugee girl rescued from Sinjar Mountain, Newroz refugee camp,
northern Syria, August 2014.
|
I think of the Syrian war, and my mind is filled once more with
memories of astonishing vividness: The deep blue of the sky during a
barrel bombing of the Sha'ar neighborhood in Aleppo, in the scorching
summer of 2012. YPG fighters crossing the Tigris River in dinghies by
night, in dead silence. The swishing of the water, the stars reflected in
it and the blank expanse ahead. A hospital for Kurdish fighters in Derik,
in summer 2014, filled with men wounded in the fight to open the corridor
to Sinjar Mountain and the trapped Yazidis. Very dark-skinned Ktaeb
Hezbollah militiamen at a frontline position just east of Ramadi city in
Iraq in July 2015. The ghost-like figures of ISIS men, in black, running
quickly past a gap in their defensive position. The first rebels, in
Idlib Province, with hope, long since lost. The Yazidi refugees, just
down from Sinjar, at the Newroz refugee camp in summer 2014, their
exhausted, haunted eyes and the black horror of the things they
described.
We are left with the bare facts behind all this – facts with which the
policymaking echelon in the West has only just begun to grapple. The
prison-house states are broken to pieces. The forces released from their
ruins are swirling and clashing across the region and heading beyond it.
Syria has become one of the hinges upon which regional and global events
turn. The reputations of great powers, global and regional, are being
made and broken among its ruins. It is war, and madness. And it is far
from over.
Jonathan Spyer is director of the
Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs and a fellow at the
Middle East Forum.
|
|
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment